Release Blitz: Knight of Pentacles by Nina Mason

Release
Day Blitz: Knight of Pentacles by Nina Mason

Today we
celebrate the release of Knight of
Pentacles, book three in Nina Mason’s Knights of the Tarot series. Unlike
the first two books in the series, which Nina revised and re-released on May
24, Knight of Pentacles has never
been released before.

Knight of Pentacles, an
erotic PNR/UF set primarily on Scotland’s Black Isle, tells of the romance
between Sir Axel Lochlann, who guards the portal into Avalon, and Jenna
Cameron, the daughter of a witch who hasn’t yet discovered her powers. Their
love story is based on the old Scottish ballad of Tam Lin, which plays an
important role in the book.

Here’s the blurb:

The
future looks bleak for Jenna Cameron when, after a five-year engagement, her
fiancé breaks it off the night before the wedding. Hoping to regroup, Jenna
decides to drive alone to the cottage on Scotland’s mysterious Black Isle where
they were supposed to spend their honeymoon. When her car breaks down, Jenna
wonders if her troubles can get any worse. Then, while cutting through a
secluded glen, she sees a handsome man bathing in a waterfall. The next day,
she learns the man she saw is the faery knight who guards the portal into
Avalon, the otherworld island ruled by Morgan Le Fay.

Jenna, ready to be rid of the virginity she’s saved in vain, offers herself to
Sir Axel Lochlann, the shaman knight of Faery Glen. From that moment on, she
finds herself inside a faery tale complete with druids, goblins, runic magic,
and vampire owls. She also discovers powers she didn’t know she had—powers she
can use to break Sir Axel’s bonds to Queen Morgan.

First, however, she must persuade Axel to put his desire to be free ahead of
his duty to the queen he’s sworn to serve and obey.

Here’s
a little more about the Knights of the Tarot series:

Knights
of the Tarot, a four-part series, was born of a relatively simple concept. Nina
wanted to write a paranormal/fantasy series incorporating different forms of
divination. Tarot cards, astrology, runes, numerology, and the like. From that
kernel grew the overarching storyline. The heroes of this contemporary
paranormal series are Scottish noblemen of times past who were taken by the
faeries into Avalon to serve as breeding drones to the queen, the legendary
Morgan le Fay. Each of the books tells the story of a particular knight and the
heroine whose love saves him from his unhappy existence.

Each
hero grapples with a different relationship with their cruel and selfish queen.
Callum Lyon, the knight of book one (Knight
of Wands), is free of Morgan’s influence, having escaped Avalon after
faking his death. Leith MacQuill, the knight of book two (Knight of Cups), was expelled from Avalon after the queen
discovered his affair with one of the ladies of her court. To punish Leith,
Morgan cursed him so any women he should fall in love with in the future would
die.

In Knight of Pentacles, Axel Lochlann is
still enslaved to the queen, who he serves as a guardian of the portal between
the mortal and immortal realms.

The Knight of Swords (book four) is Finn
MacKnight does not yet know he is destined to fulfill an ancient prophecy
telling of the queen’s overthrow by a natural-born drone.

The
knights are blood-drinking shape-shifters who can assume the form of any
creature, real or mythical, but generally take the form of their alter ego.
Callum’s preferred form is a lion, Leith’s is a Kellas Cat, Axel’s is a
gyrfalcon, and Finn’s is a jaguar.

Axel Lochlann, the
hero of Knight of Pentacles is a
Highlander of Viking descent who uses runes for divination and magic. For those
who don’t know what runes are, they’re the letters of an alphabet called the
Futhark, the first system of writing developed and used by the Germanic
peoples.

More than just letters to make words, each rune is an ideographic or
pictographic symbol of some cosmological principle or power. When written
together in various sequences, the powers can be invoked to cast protective
spells. Individual runes carved into stones, bone, or wood are used to seek the
guidance and wisdom of the Old Norse gods, especially Odin, who discovered the
runes after hanging upside down for nine days from Yggdrasil, the Old Norse
tree of life .

* * * *

GIVEAWAY!

Order Knight of
Pentacles today for a chance to win the beautiful blue-onyx runes pictured
above. To enter, simply email your proof of purchase to NinaMasonAuthor@gmail.com.

* * * *

Here’s an excerpt from Knight of Pentacles:

As the sputtering engine gasped its last, Jenna Cameron set
her forehead against the steering wheel and groaned. Could this day get any
worse? As if it weren’t enough her world had turned upside down, now her car
decided to quit in the dead of night on a desolate stretch of road with no
bloody cellular signal.

If not for the dream she’d had last
night, she’d be Mrs. William Comstock right now, on her way to the honeymoon
cottage she’d rented with the man she’d waited five long and frustrating years
to marry.

The thought of William sent a chill through Jenna. In the
dream, she’d seen herself driving off the edge of a cliff. She was married to
William and utterly miserable. As her car soared over the edge of the
precipice, she heard her mother’s voice. “The right man is out there, waiting
for you to find him. But it will never be if you bind yourself to a man you
don’t love.”

As soon as she awoke, she rang William. When she told him
about the dream, he said, as she’d secretly hoped he would, “I
was willing to overlook that your mother was a witch because I believed your
father had safely guided you away from the path of darkness, but now I see
that, like her, you have been led astray. I pray someday you will embrace the
Light of God, Jenna. I truly do. But, for now, I cannot risk my own immortal
soul by marrying someone so susceptible to the darkness.”

William, a Presbyterian pastor like her father, blamed everything he did
not understand on the devil.

As relieved as Jenna was to have escaped, the sudden change
of course had thrown her life into chaos. Expecting to be married, she’d given
up her job and flat in Edinburgh and, consequently, was left with no source of
income and nowhere to live.

So, she was on her way to the rented cottage in Rosemarkie,
a small seaside town on Scotland’s Black Isle. Since she couldn’t get her
deposit back, it seemed like a good idea to use the cottage to reflect and
regroup.

Coming all this way alone had suddenly lost its appeal, but
here she was—and wallowing in self-pity was not going to solve anything.
According to the Google map she’d printed out, she wasn’t far from her
destination. She might as well suck it up and walk the rest of the way. When
she got there, she could ring a garage about her car.

Grabbing her purse, her forest-green wool cloak, and the
battery-powered torch she kept in the glove box, she climbed out of the car and
set off along the rural tree-lined road, which was dark and a little spooky. No
cars passed her in either direction. Crickets chirped all around and small
rustlings from the surrounding woods startled her sporadically. Senses alert,
she stopped repeatedly to check her mobile for a signal.

Her heart pounded and, despite the chill in the air, she was
sweating under her cloak and sweater. The only good thing she could say about
her present predicament was that her fear of being torn to pieces by wild
animals had temporarily eclipsed her other worries.

She didn’t know how long she’d been walking when she came to
an old stone bridge. Just beyond was a sign. She shone the beam of her torch at
the words carved into the wooden plaque.

Faery
Glen.

Jenna
took heart. She’d read something about the glen on the website for the cottage,
so she shouldn’t have much farther to go. Unfortunately, she needed to pee
rather urgently. Might there be somewhere to go in the glen?

Venturing into a forest in the middle of the night might not
be the smartest thing she’d ever done, but her bladder was bursting and she
wasn’t about to tinkle by the side of the road. Just because no cars had gone
by since she’d started walking, didn’t mean one wouldn’t appear the moment she
dropped her knickers. Besides, there was a carpark abutting the glen, so there
might be a public lavatory there as well.

Up above, the sky was an indigo canvas splattered with
specks of white, some larger than others. She crossed the small asphalt lot.
Finding no bathroom, she squatted in the bushes. When she’d finished her
business, she shone the torch into the glen. Everything outside the beam was
pitch black. Water ran somewhere nearby. Thirst drew her down the footpath. All
that crying had made her as parched as a dry sponge.

I’ll
only go a little ways, find the stream, and take a wee sip.

The hollow clomp of her footsteps disturbed the silence as
she crossed a wooden bridge. On the other side, the path curved sharply. In a
clearing just beyond the turn were the falls. In the silver light of the full
moon, the cascading water reminded her of the bridal veil she might never get a
chance to wear.

Then, she saw him. A man in the pool below the falls. He was
stark naked, soaking wet, and had his back to her.

Alarm electrifying every nerve ending, she stepped back into
the shadows. Her first thought was that he might be a homeless man who’d taken
refuge in the woods. He had a beard and long hair, so it seemed the most
logical explanation. Her next thought was that he might be performing some sort
of ritual. She was on the Black Isle, after all, in a place called Faery Glen
on the night of a full moon, so his being a New Age warlock or druid didn’t
seem all that infeasible. A long shot, perhaps, but not meters outside the
realm of possibility.

When curiosity overrode her apprehension, she stepped closer
to get a better look at him. The moonlight bathing his glistening physique
revealed a tall, slender frame with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a shapely
bum. Wetness and poor lighting made telling the color of his hair impossible.
Light brown, maybe, or dark blond. She started a little when he bent over and
shook his head like a dog. As he threw it back, he raised his muscular white
arms to push the clinging wet hair off his face.

Despite her long engagement and having achieved the ripe age
of twenty-five, she’d never seen a naked man before. Not in the flesh, anyway,
and watching this one bathing in the wild was making her feel things she
shouldn’t. The prospect of being caught spying on him was even more unsettling.

Ducking behind the thick trunk of the nearest tree, she
watched as he continued his bath. Drunk on a tart cocktail of shame and lust,
she took in the graceful slope of his shoulders, the long muscles supporting
his serrated spine, and the alluring dimples just below the small of his back.
His beautiful form and the way the moonlight sparkled on the droplets clinging
to his skin made her pulse race and her knees weaken.

A strong urge to touch him welled up inside her. How badly
she wanted to run her hands over every glistening curve and indentation of his
manly form—both for prurient reasons and to absorb some of his confidence the
way plants absorbed sunlight. As exposed as he was to the elements, he seemed
admirably comfortable in his skin.

She’d never felt that at ease with herself, even when alone.
All her life, she’d been made to feel inferior. As much as she didn’t want to
believe that she was, part of her did.

Mesmerized by the man in the pool, she went on watching.
Something told her he was like her mother. Esoteric rather than religious.
Open-minded instead of rigid. Accepting, not judging. She couldn’t say how or
why she sensed this about him. She only knew she felt it deep down in some
instinctive part of her psyche.

Hope fluttered in her heart. Could he be the one her mother
spoke of in the dream? Scoffing at her romantic delusions, she smashed the
thought with the rock of reason and headed back to the footpath.

About
the author:

Nina
Mason is an incurable romantic who strives to write the same kind of books she
loves to read: those that entertain, edify, educate, and enlighten. In addition
to the Knights of the Tarot series, she is the author of Royal Pains, an erotic
historical series following a Scottish duke and duchess through the hedonism
and intrigues of the Restoration period, and Sins Against the Sea, a paranormal
romance steeped in the myth and magic of the Scottish Isles.

Born and raised in Southern California, Ms. Mason currently
lives with her family in Woodstock, Georgia. When she isn't writing, she makes
art dolls and works as a consultant for Pure Romance, a line of
relationship-enhancement products.